Waukesha High School - Megaphone Yearbook (Waukesha, WI)

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JUNIOR HIGH FOOTBALL Top Row, left to right-Mr. Corrigan, Hockett, Miller, Helker, Enders, Boccaccio. Bottom Row--Moen, Edwards, Reid, Mittlesteadt, Russell, Maragos, Engstrom. If we are to have an art of life, must we HOF exercise equal care in trying to dis- criminate between the influences and values of all the tools that we use in making the infinitely more complex work, an individual human life of significance and happiness and worth? We have got to think what all these tools-things, situa- tions, surroundings, relationships-may mean for our own individual selves, for our own private lives, regardless of the standards of the majority, before we can begin to live as human beings and develop an art of life. Otherwise we are mere telephone switchboards, like animals, receiving stimuli and sending our reactions. Until we have given thought to this, we can use all our tools and material only at random and with no idea of the result we are producing. If we can decide what we want to make of ourselves and what tools will best assist the result, then we can vastly simplify our lives by a wholesale rejection of all those things which may be well enough for our neighbors but do not conduce to the one desired end for ourselves. We would then no longer wear ourselves out in the mere living of standardized lives and keeping up with the Joneses. We would not only simplify our lives, but we would introduce Variety into the deadly monotony of the national life. No two artists would have exactly the same con- ception of a subject or treat it in exactly the same way. If it is true that our lives are increasingly frustrate and commonplace and standardized because we do not take time and trouble to think out what is the worthwhile life and achieve a scale of values, is it not because we lack the courage to be different from the Joneses and to give to our lives that precise quality of uniqueness which is characteristic of the products of art? The three qualities, therefore, which would seem to be essential to any artistic ordering of our lives are courage, thought, and will. We have got to acquire that rarest form of courage in America, the courage to be considered different from our neighbors and the rest of our set. Page One Hundred Twenty-three

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the bed of ivory and ebony of indescribable design had its covering of leopard skins, Icould not help musing on . mf' -1, fi - ,I 8 ' 1 K 5 V what subtle differences ' -sri, yi iff: f in one's spiritual and ' g -5 g A intellectual character if 9 . fig I . . Q A H-V! 54 va-1 3' , 'Q would come from living . f' ' .. wg NJ-If il ' , ' 1 .A ' 4. . :Nc ones life amid sucn I . I gl , I furnishings. as con- . if v - Q - A trasted. we will say. X 1 li N ' ' . Ji with bedrooms of com- 21, Y - A . g v plete and perfect Queen . -, - ' Anne or Louis Qua- torze. ln the room l mention. the atmosphere, due to the furnishings, was an almost maleficent blend- ing of the perfection of twentieth century civilization with the savagery of the jungle. As one stood there, in a room designed as the last word in French art and craftsmanship for a millionaire of 1929, one was aware in part of one's soul of the faint booming of tom-toms and of the odor of black and sweaty jungle Hesh. A man could not live in that room without strange things happening in the depths of his being. GIRLS' FIELD HOCKEY This. perhaps, may be said to be an extreme example, as was Hergesheimer's, but is it? Do not all our surroundings and things affect us? The social effects of such things as automobiles, radios, and so on have now become commonplaces, but what of the effects on the individual? In many ways a man or woman with a motor car is a diH'erent creature from one without one. Think how many lives have been altered by the reading of a single book. The laboring man who lives in a Sixth Avenue room in New York facing on the elevated railroad is a different man from one who lives in a cottage and garden in Devon or amid quiet and roses in the Vaucluse. All this would seem to be so self-evident as to call for no elaboration, and yet do we pay any attention to it? XVhen we try to live as everyone else does, when we buy something because Ueverybody has one, are we not using our tools with an utter lack of discrimina- tion? There is a similar decadence in some directions in the arts other than that of life, a tendency to put any old thing on canvas, to clutter up a novel with irrelevant details on the plea of realism. We might as well try to eat everything as have everything, regardless of our own taste or the idiosyncrasies of our own digestions. A painter does not use his scarlet or blue or orange brushes regard- less of the effect, merely because they are there He selects his colors as he does his objects, for their final inffuence on his work, or he merely produces a daub. Page One Hundred Twenty-two

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If Mrs. Jones' greatest joys in life are the perfectly appointed dinners she delights in being known to give. and riding in her Rolls'Royce. then let her have them if she can afford them. But if your greatest joys are simple hospitality and the good talk around the board. and if you care far more for books than the sort of car that affords you transportation. then in the name of Art give simple dinners. line your shelves with books, and drive a Eord. If you love Elizabethan 3 dv - Schmoller. Maragos, Boccaccio. Bottom RowfPease. Greene. drama nd ttest the Current Peters. Mielke. Rosenmerkel. Zenkevech. JUNIOR HIGH BASEBALL Top Row, left to right-Mr. Corrigan, Dunn, Johnson. fiction. read your drama: and when someone asks you if you have read The Mauve Petticoat, tell him candid- ly that you have not and that you do not intend to. If you are intelligent enough to be bored stiff with the absurd social life of ninety-nine clubs in a hundred, refuse to join the things and amuse yourself in your own way. Americans pride themselves on their courage and individuality and brag of the frontier virtues, but the fact is we are the most cowardly race in the world socially. Read Emerson's essay on Self Reliance and ask yourself honestly how much you dare to be yourself. I-Ie has been called the most essentially American of our authors. but would he be so today? The old phrases have a familiar ring. 'ATrust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformistf' My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. XVhat I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. Life only avails, not the having lived. Insist on yourself: never imitate. Every schoolboy knows them, but how many mature Americans dare to practise them? Take the matter of clothes as a simple touch- stone of individuality. Every American woman who goes to London is either shocked. interested or amused by the variety of womens dress there. Most of it, except sports clothes. is. I admit, extremely bad, but the point is that a woman dresses just as she pleases. Little girls may have long black stockings or legs bare to their full length: older women may have skirts that display the knee or drag the ground: hats of the latest mode from Paris, or from Regent Street when Victoria was a girl. Vvfatching the passing crowd on the Board Walk is like turning the pages of Punch for half a century. A man may wear any headgear from a golf cap to a pearl satin topper Compare this, for example, with New York and the mass antics of the Stock Exchange where if a man wears a straw hat Page One Hundred Twenry-four